Fiction

cloudsplitter

Russell Banks

Secker & Warburg, #16.99

THE most obvious feature of Cloudsplitter is its size, the 758 pages; though, as with any writer, this novel carries echoes of Russell Banks's other works.

In novels such as Rule of the Bone, Affliction, and The Sweet Hereafter, Banks has shown an affinity with those who have been abused or neglected, people on the edge of society. He is an especially acute observer of the relationship between fathers and sons, especially on the ways in which the one can dominate the other. Another theme is race.

Cloudsplitter is narrated by Owen Brown, son of John Brown, the American anti-slavery reformer whose ''soul goes marching on''. Owen's mother died when he was eight. His father is a religious zealot and failed businessman whose obsessions ruined himself and his family. He is compounded of passion and bigotry, a man without forgiveness or even compassion for those who disagree with his opinions, a man without understanding of, far less sympathy for, the weakness or inadequacy of others.

''He burned and burned ceaselessly,'' says Owen, ''and though we were sometimes scorched by his flame, we were seldom warmed by it.''

As a young man, John Brown carried a stone in his mouth to remind himself not to speak recklessly; and the lines from the Battle Hymn of the Republic about his ''terrible swift sword'' are literally true. He carried a broadsword across the Kansas plains to hack slave owners.

''Was my father mad?''

asks Owen Brown. ''For if he was sane, then terrible things about race and human nature, especially here in North America, are true.''

The focus of Owen's life is Harpers Ferry, where his father led a raid on the Federal arsenal, hoping to provoke a slave rebellion. Most of the men were killed, including two of Brown's 20 children. No slaves rebelled. Brown was hanged, and, for Owen, existence since then has been ''an after-life''.

He sets his story down for Miss Mayo, a researcher for Professor Oswald Garrison Villard, his father's biographer. ''I will tell everything,'' he says towards the beginning, remarking near the end, ''I suppose that what I am inscribing on these pages is the Secret History of John Brown.'' It is also Owen's tale, and in an author's note Banks reiterates the nature of fiction, imagination, and invention.

What he has achieved is beyond fiction or biography. His narrative is fuelled by more than the story of a man and his times. He embraces the myths and legends that surround Brown, revealing an obsession that occasionally overstretches the narrative. Despite the longueurs, nothing is casual or without interest and these diversions are necessary because of the insights into the life and times, even the trades and diets, of nineteenth-century Americans.

Banks delivers the ambivalence of the Brown family's racial attitude and with it a critique of the American liberal establishment's stalwarts of love and moral duty. American identity, he suggests, is not complete; it is a divided whole. What is beyond doubt is Banks's masterly achievement.